The general consumer’s viewpoint would have been doubly shaken by the fact that that this failure engulfed not just any national airline, but a Swiss national airline.
On top of this, SwissAir’s demise was viewed by the Swiss as the country’s biggest national image failure since World War II.
Now, why should so dramatic a view be held? A precedent had already been set with the death of one of Australia’s major air carriers, Ansett Australia, having been announced a couple of weeks prior to the SwissAir announcement.
The reason for the widespread astonishment over SwissAir’s bankruptcy lay in the fact that the collapse was perceived by the consumer as evidence of weakness in the ostensibly unassailable Swiss brand.
When we think about Switzerland, we form associations like the ubiquitous Swiss army knife, Swatch watches, the Red Cross, Nestlé, Rolex, UBS, Credit Suisse and a host of other high-quality brands; brands that have reputations built on top quality, reliability, integrity and trust.
When you buy a Swiss-branded item, your trust in it is exacted at a premium price. You pay the price because of your appreciation of the item’s quality; because of your trust that, among other assumptions, that nothing will go wrong with it. Or almost nothing.
It was Friday, 5 October 2001, when SwissAir grounded its fleet.
It was also the day UBS and Credit Suisse First Boston both announced that they were not prepared to help their fellow-brand. And it was the day thousands of SwissAir customers around the world became suddenly stranded in foreign ports, unable to come home or reach their intended destinations.
Reports in the British press included interviews with a number of SwissAir passengers. All of them shared a common reason for choosing to fly with SwissAir - that, in these turbulent and volatile times, SwissAir was the only airline company they trusted.
That trust was greeted with the ironic fact that, now, those customers were grounded and their tickets were worth less than the paper on which they were printed. Thus, Friday, 5 October, 2001, marked the realisation of every brand’s nightmare.
The flipside of the brand-damage scenario was that SwissAir’s fate inspired consumers to reconsider their estimations of what Switzerland, as a brand, really stands for.
Did the SwissAir incident really damage Switzerland as a brand? One thing’s for sure. The Swiss-Air collapse caused a lot of damage. Not only for SwissAir itself, but for most Swiss brands as well.
But, I also believe that consumers comprehend that nothing is static. Everything in life is mutable and trusting a brand for life might just not be possible anymore. Even the strongest brands can go under.
